A GRADE POINT AVERAGE = 3.14797364528243500325637
IS RIDICULOUS.  WHY?

Many people are apparently unaware of just how ridiculous the practice of grade point averaging is.  This includes (unfortunately) many educators and educational bureaucrats, who should know better.  These people assume that a simple number, for example 2.7, can actually represent a grade point average that absolutely reflects a student's skill and effort and learning.   It does not matter whether the student went to Harvard University or to a community college.  It doesn't matter whether the student majored in biology with a minor in genetic splicing or in basket weaving.  It doesn't even matter if one student was in college and the other student was in middle school.  A grade point average is widely thought to be the kind of measurement that is as precisely fixed as the places of the stars in the firmament.

This is nonsense.  It is important that this is recognized as such because it leads to a major injustice when students are denied state funded scholarships because of phony grade point average requirements.  In South Carolina there are thousands (and probably tens of thousands) of students who have lost Life Scholarships on the basis of grade point average requirements that are arbitrary, irrational, and inconsistent. 

In South Carolina students are required to maintain a 3.00 grade point average to maintain a Life Scholarship, for example.  In fact the state violates the constitutional rights of college students to due process and equal protection when it takes a Life Scholarship away from a student with a 2.8 or a 2.9 grade point average.  Forget about the 3.00 grade point average requirement.    If a 3.0 grade point average mean "good" work, then what does a 2.9 grade point average mean?  Less than good work??  And then what does a 2.8 grade point average mean?  Less than less good work??  And then what does a 2.7 grade point average mean?  Less than less than less good work, but better than average work??  Trying to pin down what these numbers mean quickly becomes absurd.  In other words the state of South Carolina (along with other states) is taking scholarships away from students on the basis of meaningless, unreasonable, absurd criteria.

In this country grade point averaging assumes that millions of different educators --- who are teaching hundreds of different subjects at thousands of different schools to different age groups --- can be mathematically precise in assigning “good” grades for good “work” where there is no uniform understanding for what is “good” and what is “work”.  This is like assuming that millions of people can assign and average grades to rationally compare things as varied as books, kitchen sinks, cars, vacation resorts, cigars, hotels, schools, investments, magazines, physical beauty, musical compositions, sports teams, restaurant meals, etc.  Averaging grades like this completely ignores the content-value-context-price-skill level of what is being evaluated. 

This is not even wrong.  It is an irrational misuse of numbers.  It is like saying that a 3.03 grade point average apple from an American orchard is better than a 2.98 grade point average automobile made in Japan by exactly 0.05 degrees of    “goodness”.  This is nonsense.  Millions of educators can repeatedly and uniformly agree that an object weighs 2.3 or 3.82 or 1.596 etc. pounds with a suitable scale.  However, there is no objective unit (like the inch or the pound) or instrument (like a ruler or a scale) for measuring academic “goodness” or for measuring academic “work”. 

Irrational mathematical comparisons of grade point averages represent the claim that already vague and subjective measures of “goodness” (like a college grade of B without reference to subject, school, educational level, etc.) can be subdivided and refined yet further into ten (3.0), or a hundred (3.00), or even a thousand (3.000) sub degrees of “goodness”.  Grading crimes and criminal punishments according to this kind of “mathematical logic" would not be tolerated for a moment because it would violate the due process and equal protection clauses in the Constitution.  Imagine trying to imprison someone for what is described as precisely 2.78 degree “bad” behavior, or “bad” behavior in the 2.78th degree.  Imagine trying to explain how being "bad" in the 2.78th degree differs from being "bad" in the 2.79th or in the 2.77th degree.  

In fact numbers like this are meaningless, and attempting to use numbers in this way is disingenuous.  In taking away state funded scholarships from college students that are worth $20,000 or more, states like South Carolina use subjective, unscientific, misleading grade point average comparisons in ways that violate the constitutional rights of students to due process and equal protection.  These states are guilty of using deceptive, flimflam arithmetic in deciding who gets to keep state funded scholarships. 

This needs to stop.  That is, this needs to stop if this country is going to have an excellent educational system.  It is impossible to achieve educational excellence when the markers for academic achievement and for spending huge sums of money on education are meaningless and intellectually dishonest.

POSTSCRIPT

None of these comments are meant to imply that all grading systems for measuring academic achievement should be rejected.  How grading systems should be organized is a subject for another time and place. 

What this article is saying is that current systems of grading students are accepted by people who do not understand that arbitrarily assigning a precise number to a subjective quality (for example, a student’s understanding of English literature) and then comparing this to another arbitrarily precise number (for example, another student’s understanding of art history) is not the same as precisely and objectively making comparisons which involve physical measurements of some kind. 

Furthermore, it is a fact that in today’s educational systems programs for grading and testing students are corrupted by political considerations and money.  In today’s educational systems anyone who trusts in the government’s promises to leave “no child behind” in another ten years is simply gullible.  An educational system that is governed by money and political correctness is incapable of evaluating itself objectively or of making reliable promises for future educational programs.  In this writer’s opinion any of the statistics or information about testing students that comes from a government educational bureaucracy is worthless.

Fortunately, free, privately funded, easily accessed, convenient, high quality Internet high school and college programs will enable millions of students and their families to ignore expensive government (and quasi government, or so-called “private”) programs of education.  With free, high quality online educational systems students and parents (and anyone else) will be able to choose free educational programming that conveniently meets their needs whenever they are ready to study and learn.  This will be the ultimate in “school choice”.